By Maurice Makalu
The Examinations Council of Zambia has been preparing Grade 12 examinations for many decades. You would expect that over the decades, their learning curve has flattened and they have mastered their processes, especially with specific regard to: missing results, results under protest and name misspelling.
You would have to have a child’s results missing, her name misspelt or writing under protest, to discover that this institution has never bothered to learn from its yearly experiences to resolve these normal and expected examination problems.
Two members of my family (Cases A and B) and a neighbor (Case C) re-wrote their Grade 12 exams in 2011 “under protest.”
Case A: paid exam fees and registered for exams; her exam number never came. The school nevertheless allowed her to sit. Her results (two subjects) never came out. Case B: sat for History and Commerce, her commerce results came out but history was “absent.” Case C: sat for English, History, Agricultural Science and Biology. Her results for English, History and Agricultural science came out, but for biology, her name appeared on candidates for science instead of biology. The school allowed her to write biology under protest and the results are missing. The transcript marks her “absent” from science.
We presented these three cases to ECZ, accompanied with letters from the relevant schools and photocopies of transcripts for cases B and C and exam fee receipt for case C on 14th March, 2012. After explaining that the respective schools, not ECZ, were to blame for the errors, a certain lady whose name cannot be publicly revealed, received our appeal letters and assured us that it takes three weeks to resolve “under protest” queries.
We happily believed this assurance especially that there was a notice at ECZ saying ECZ would stop receiving queries pertaining to 2011 exams in May 2012. Our confidence was further lifted when, asked for a follow up contact number, the lady wrote 252544 and extension 2234; the telephone operator at ECZ later changed that extension to 2212 as the extension for the lady.
[pullquote]We asked the lady to say, “Since you just check on your computer if the people who do the actual searching have found the results and posted them, would you refer us to the actual people who do the searching?” She said they are very busy and there are no phones where they work.[/pullquote]
The three weeks has now turned into three months going into the fourth. It appears that every time we call 2212, all we are told is, “There are many people with similar problems, give us more time.”
It is as if customer service at ECZ means: let the customer know it’s impossible to help them; tell them there is too much work, your child is sick and in hospital (she did tell me); tell them your job is just to look on your screen to check if the results have been found, and if the computer does not show the results, tell the customer there is nothing you can do.
We asked the lady to say, “Since you just check on your computer if the people who do the actual searching have found the results and posted them, would you refer us to the actual people who do the searching?” She said they are very busy and there are no phones where they work.
What is this: laziness, incompetence, dullness or just the wrong people in wrong positions?
Every exam process has errors because no process is perfect. But it is unacceptable that it should take ages to resolve these errors in an old institution like ECZ. These errors happen every year and the ECZ must have learnt from their experiences by now.
We have been referred to a man the lady said was her superior. All he said was he could speak with her to see how she could assist us. But still, we keep being told: too many queries, give us more time.
This is infuriating!
